In this paper we explore the subject of question asking as an inherent driver of enterprise modelling sessions, within the narrower context of the ‘dialogue game’ approach to collaborative modelling. We explain the context, but mostly report on matters directly concerning question asking and answer pre-structuring as a central issue in an ongoing effort aiming for the practiceoriented developme...

An increasing number of consumer products for everyday use offer the user advanced programming capabilities. Existing technologies offer the potential to design human-product interaction supported by collaborative dialogue. Collaboration can afford a rich level of conversation between product and user. However, there are few methods and tools for designers, requiring a minimum of software engin...

Usability in real-time collaborative applications can be improved with better workspace awareness. In particular, the radar view is the most intuitive user-interface widget for workspace awareness. We extend previous work by developing a radar-like widget to explore how workspace awareness can be supported in wider and non-laboratory settings that scale to over two users. Despite the widget’s n...

We explain dialogue management techniques for collaborative activities with humans, involving multiple concurrent tasks. Conversational context for multiple concurrent activities is represented using a “Dialogue Move Tree” and an “Activity Tree” which support multiple interleaved threads of dialogue about different activities and their execution status. We also describe the incremental message ...

One purpose of online group projects is to encourage collaborative dialogue for new knowledge construction. During such projects students have a dual objective: learn through constructing new knowledge together while also completing the task. Cooperative approaches to task completion are an alternative to collaborative dialogue. The impact of task type on collaborative versus cooperative approa...

I will describe the current status of a long-term effort at developing dialogue systems that go beyond simple task execution models to systems that involve collaborative problem solving. Such systems involve open-ended discussion and the tasks cannot be accomplished without extensive interaction (e.g., 10 turns or more). The key idea is that dialogue itself arises from an agent’s ability for co...

We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue moves. The method identifies significant two-step excitatory transitions between dialogue moves, integrates the transitions into a directed graph representation, and generates and tests data-driven hypotheses from the directed graph. The method was applied to a large corpus of student-tutor dialogue...

This paper presents a model of dialogue initiative within a collaborative discourse. The importance of varying initiative between participants is validated both in theory and in experiments. For example, it was found that one initiative setting algorithm was up to 50% better than if initiative is random. Furthermore, a method for varying levels of initiative between participants is presented wh...

Evaluation of complex, collaborative dialogue systems is a difficult task. Traditionally, developers have relied upon subjective feedback from the user, and parametrisation over observable metrics. However, both models place some reliance on the notion of a task; that is, the system is helping to user achieve some clearly defined goal, such as book a flight or complete a banking transaction. It...

We aim at improving the collaborative character of the responses in the GoDiS dialogue system participating in information-seeking dialogues. In this paper we describe how the system currently deals with successful and unsuccessful database search and show the need for generating more collaborative responses. We consider conditional yes/no responses as one kind of collaborative responses and di...